Culture is a Perversion

Culture is not your friend.

Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection scheme, or what have you. It is not your friend, it insults you. It disempowers you, and it uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential and the rights of the individual.

We understand the felt presence of experiences, which is most important.

Culture is a perversion, it fetishes objects, creates consumer mania, while it preaches endless forms of false happiness. Endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults.

It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

It’s often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values because science deals with facts. Facts and values seem to belong to different spheres.

It’s often thought that there is no description of the way the world is, that can tell us how the world ought to be.

I think this is quite clearly untrue.

Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well being of conscience creatures.

Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior?

The evolution of our species took hundreds of thousands of years, and working through interaction evolution used essentially the technology created species to bring on the next stage, which were the first steps in technology evolution.

Now to speak about the conditions of well being in this life for human beings.

We know that there is a continuum of thus facts. We know that it’s possible to live in a failed state, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Where mothers cannot feed their children or strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration, where people are murdered indiscriminately.

We know that it’s possible to move along this continuum, towards something quite a bit more idyllic. Keep in mind that if you take a tour through the hospital, and look at every machine, there is an on/off switch which has been brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition. That machine is based on principles of physics discovered by physicists, in a machine designed by an engineer.

If we could convert .03% of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030.

There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish whether or not we understand these truths, and morality relates to these truths.

So when talking about values we are talking about facts.

A lot of people when they think about the future, think about it linearly. They think they are going to continue to address a problem using today’s tools. Today’s pace of progress, and fail to take into consideration the exponential growth.

The speed of exponential growth is itself speeding up, so in 25 years these technologies will be a billion times more powerful than they are today. And we’ve already seen that kind of progress.

The first step took tens of thousands of years. Stone tools, fire, the wheel…it kept accelerating. We always use the latest generation of technology to create the next generation.

Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud, or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud, is no god I want to have any part of. It’s some kind of Gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.

When you see around the globe the mal- distribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in undeveloped countries. When you see so few haves and so many have nots. When you see the greed, and the concentration of power.

Don’t you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism? Whether greed is a good idea to run on?

What is greed?  Hording.

For over 90% of our existence on this planet, we were nomadic, egalitarian hunter-gathers. Capitalism is just a stage in human evolution.

It is possible for individuals and even for whole cultures to care about the wrong things?

Which is to say it’s possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering. Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality.

What civilization is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in.

We live in a world filled with destructive technology. This technology can not be un-invented.

It will always be easier to break things than to fix them.

It’s not a pleasant situation, and yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding; the scientific know how, the love and the community to produce the kind of human paradise.

The story will never end, the present is infinite.

We are led by the least among us, the least intelligent, the least noble. The least visionary.

But it seems to reward -not virtue, as much as the ability to manipulate the system.

And what does reward virtue?  Do you think American President’s reward virtue?

This is what I think the world needs now. It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to human flourishing, and morality relates to that domain of facts.

Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality.

It seems to be therefore, patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate the vast differences in notions of human well being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes.

We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life, and to do that, we have to admit that these questions have answers.

Related Articles

Are We Awakened?
It All Goes Back in the Box
Changing the Way we Think